Rihaku stuffed his plump, heavy purse into his robes and made his way along the road leading to the pleasure quarter. It was his first day off since receiving his pay the other day. As a military officer, Rihaku lived in the barracks, but on his days off he would come out into town like this. His destination was the brothel where the "Great Rose" awaited.
His steps today were far lighter than usual. That was because he had run into an acquaintance—a court lady—earlier. She was a plain-looking girl called Maomao, but her connections were surprisingly extensive. She was on close enough terms with Shirane, the "Great Rose" herself, to call her "Young Lady." Maomao had been passing through the gate carrying a small furoshiki. Having finally been granted a day off, she was heading back to her home in the pleasure quarter. If that was the case, paying her respects to her elder sister figure was a foregone conclusion, and they might even start a tea party right at the
entrance
of Rokushōkan.
For Rihaku, who usually
just had tea
with the madam whenever he visited Rokushōkan, this was a fine chance to catch sight of a
pretty face
for once. In other words, his real scheme was to use Maomao as a pretext to meet Shirane.
So he had set out with that in mind, but the sun had only just reached its zenith. The pleasure quarter didn't start receiving customers until the sun began to set.
There might be daytime operations, but Shirane was a night person, and he'd heard from one of the madams that even if she was awake, she wouldn't emerge until close to evening. Going now would be far too early.
"Can't be helped."
Rihaku decided to kill some time at a nearby eatery.
"What'll it be, mister?"
A forward girl called out to him in a familiar tone. She was acting as a waitress,
but her gaze appraised Rihaku like she was sizing him up. The restaurant was spacious yet dim, with only a sparse scattering of customers. Some patrons whispered amongst themselves, while others chatted away with the waitresses.
Rihaku thought he might have wandered into the wrong sort of place.
The establishment was slightly removed from the pleasure quarter, but it clearly served that kind of function. The first floor was a restaurant, while the second floor was a lodging house—the sort of place where a waitress would escort a customer to a room and simply never come back.
Honestly, it wasn't the sort of place you could be seen at openly.
What they did was no different from the brothels of the pleasure quarter, but the issue was whether it was a publicly sanctioned establishment or not. Selling more than just food—selling "flowers," as it were—brought in incomparably greater revenue. And with that came a correspondingly different tax rate.
If Rihaku had been the stubborn type, he would have confronted them with evidence of tax evasion and claimed it as a commendable deed. But Rihaku wasn't that sort of person; he simply ordered what the man at the next table was eating because it looked appetizing. He knew that sort of thing was necessary for getting ahead, but Rihaku simply didn't have the head for it. He was the type who relied on physical strength, and antagonizing the local officials in charge of this jurisdiction would only create headaches. If he were going to do anything about it, it would be to get drunk with an upright civil-service acquaintance and grumble about it over drinks.
Once the waitress realized Rihaku had simply come to eat, she straightened up from her affected posture and trotted back to the kitchen. Women who worked in places like this really could switch on a dime.
Rihaku
a table.
Chapter Rihaku
As he stepped inside, he cast a quick glance around the establishment. The patrons consisted of a pair of servers flirting with a couple, a group of three deep in conversation, another pair eating at a nearby table, and Rihaku himself.
"Oh my," Rihaku's eyes drifted to the group of three. One of them was tapping the table in a deliberate rhythm. At the tip of his fingers lay a small piece of paper. When one of the servers came by with a fresh bottle of sake, she collected the empty one and withdrew—and the slip of paper that had been there was gone.
Well now, Rihaku thought.
Shady establishments naturally attract shady dealings. Here, it seemed, information was sold alongside food and women. He tilted his ear toward the group of three.
"How's business been lately?"
"About the same, really. The price of hemp's gone up a little, that's all."
An utterly ordinary merchant's conversation. Nothing suspicious about it. He could have left it at that, but old habits died hard. He found himself searching the exchange for coded language.
These were not bad times, Rihaku believed, but there were still those who grumbled. Rumors had even circulated that the warehouse explosion the other day had been orchestrated by someone. In the end, the cause was determined to be the warehouseman's carelessness with his pipe.
Come to think of it, Rihaku pulled something from his coat. It was what Maomao had handed him earlier—an ivory-boned smoking pipe. That clever court lady had polished and cleaned the ornamentation, reasoning that the warehouseman must be its owner. She'd said that with a new mouthpiece, it would be perfectly usable again.
"Not like he needs it back anyway—sell it, and it'd fetch a decent sum," Rihaku muttered to himself, though he had already begun asking the warehouse clerk for the owner's address. He considered himself a soft touch, but that was simply his nature, and he could hardly criticize others when he was no different. Once he finished eating, he decided, he'd swing by.
"Still, it's finely crafted."
Ivory came from the tusks of beasts in far-off foreign lands. Naturally, it was not something common folk could easily obtain. Something this valuable going missing—the owner must surely be searching for it.
"Here you are, sir. Sorry for the wait."
The server brought over a bowl of hot congee. The generously topped porridge had a rich chicken broth base, with vegetables and shredded meat evenly distributed throughout—it looked delicious. Alongside it came fried chicken wings, a stir-fry of vegetables, tree nuts, and pork, all of it so appetizing by scent alone that Rihaku knew the food would be good.
"That looks delicious."
"It is! It'll really pick you up."
The server flashed a winsome smile and winked at him. She was clearly trying to seduce him. In the past, a girl with a decent figure and a pretty face like this one might have stirred his appetite, but not anymore. After encountering a woman so extraordinary she seemed like a lotus blossom reclining upon still water, Rihaku's ideals had shot sky-high. Having tasted paradise, no ordinary woman could satisfy him now.
"Well then, I'll dig in."
When Rihaku showed no reaction whatsoever and simply began eating, she withdrew with a sour expression. She apparently had no other customers today, so she moved on to the pair at the neighboring table.
Over there, two portly men sat together. One of them looked thoroughly unhealthy—dark circles under puffy eyes, a bloated face. He wasn't eating, drinking only tea. The other man had demolished all of the appetizing dishes between them.
What a waste, not eating food this good, Rihaku thought as he continued working through his meal with chopsticks.
Before long, the trio settled their bill and left. While lazily stirring his spoon, Rihaku noticed the total was surprisingly high relative to the amount of sake they'd consumed, but he had no intention of doing anything about it. Still, he made sure to commit their faces to memory from the corner of his eye.
Shortly after the trio departed, the pair who had been eating also left the shop.
The server, who had been losing customers all day, looked at Rihaku with a bored expression. She clearly wished he would hurry up and finish so she could clean.
"What the hell is this?"
Li Bai walked down the road, his breathing heavy. Earlier, after finishing his meal, he had gone to deliver the pipe. And what greeted him? A stubble-faced, booze-reeking ex-warehouse worker. The moment Li Bai showed him the ivory pipe, the man had bluntly declared, "I don't need that thing—just throw it away yourself."
Li Bai was dressed in his usual clothes, not his official robes. He was on his way to meet Shiratsuma, so he had made a minimum effort with his appearance, but since he wore neither the jade pendant nor the belt denoting his official rank, the ex-warehouse worker had apparently written him off as a mere errand boy. The man had brushed him off without a shred of courtesy.
When Li Bai confirmed whether the pipe was really something precious, the man had scoffed, "How should I know? It was a gift. Someone gave it to me, so I took it, but it's completely useless—can't even get a proper flame going." Li Bai had tilted his head in confusion.
Who on earth would casually toss away an ivory object? And to someone who didn't even know its value.
When Li Bai, still finding it a waste, explained that the pipe was made of ivory, the man had snorted, "Hah? You're joking, right." The person who had given it to him was just a court lady, and since he had no use for it, she had offered it freely. The pipe had a stylish design and wasn't poor quality, so he had accepted it without fuss.
Listening to the ex-warehouse worker's story, something snagged in Li Bai's mind.
The man seemed to harbor a particular hatred for this pipe. It appeared that the man had tried to light it, which was suspected to have caused the fire in the warehouse. Thanks to that, he was alive but covered in burns, and he had been dismissed from his post as warehouse keeper.
Li Bai had intended to return the ivory pipe to the man, but since the man said he didn't want it, he decided to hold onto it.
He wanted to look into what was bothering him.
Why a court lady? Li Bai frowned.
The received pipe, the court lady who gave it, the warehouse worker, the grain warehouse, and the explosion.
Sensing that there was something unsavory lingering in what should have been a resolved case, Li Bai headed toward the pleasure district. To take a shortcut, he avoided the main road and walked through a deserted alley. Since the pleasure district lay to the south, it should be fastest to head straight south.
In the midst of this, footsteps echoed through the narrow alley. Li Bai had sharp ears—sharp enough to catch conversations at different tables in a tavern, sharp enough to estimate from the clink of coins how much a patron had paid. His superiors had asked him more than once, "Are you a dog?"
There were five of them—three in front, two behind. The sounds came from the alley beyond a house. If someone was running through the streets, they were either being chased by moneylenders or pursued by stray dogs. Never anything good.
Unable to help himself, Li Bai scaled the wall before him and slipped through the deserted house. The place looked as though no one had lived there for years—nobody would complain if he went inside. He peered quietly through a gap in the wall.
There, he recognized familiar faces. They were the customers who had been eating at the tavern earlier. Cornered against the wall were the trio who had been buying information at the food stall, while the pair doing the cornering were the stout men who had been eating nearby.
The pair was driving the trio into a corner. Numerically, it should have been the other way around, but Li Bai understood. The pair moved with a swiftness inconceivable from their builds. The sickly-faced man was one of them, while the other—a man with no distinguishing features—was deftly tightening the collar of one of the fleeing men. He whispered something by the man's ear, though it didn't quite carry far enough for even Li Bai's ears.
You've stumbled onto something ugly, Li Bai thought. He stopped showing his face, leaned his back against the wall, and quietly closed his eyes. He killed his presence and focused solely on his hearing.
In fragments, he caught the usual interrogation: "Who sent you?" "Anyone else...?" The other pallid-faced man appeared to be keeping watch over the remaining two. Every time the pair pinned against the wall made some furtive movement, a metallic clink could be heard.
Li Bai had no idea what the situation was, but in cases like this, doing nothing was the safer bet. If they were chasing people down and interrogating them in an uninhabited place like this, it meant both sides had something dirty to hide. He couldn't tell who was in the right, who was in the wrong, or whether both were in the wrong. If it were a pretty woman being harassed, that would be one thing—but seeing men cornering other men gave him no inclination to intervene.
If it looked like things were headed toward murder, he would have had to step in, but that didn't seem necessary. The stout man who had finished his interrogation was telling the other man that there was nothing to be found.
"Then let's go home."
As the pair turned to leave as though nothing had happened, one of them stopped. He happened to be directly on the other side of the wall from Li Bai.
With a dull thud, a blade plunged into the wall right beside Li Bai's face.
"What's wrong?"
"Nah, I just thought I felt someone there."
It seemed to be nothing after all — that was the conclusion drawn from the raspy voice that followed. The voice, rough as though the speaker had caught a cold, belonged to the bearded man. For some reason, it sounded faintly familiar, as if he had heard it somewhere before. And yet, the memory hovered just out of reach.
Li Bai pressed his hand against his chest and waited for his heartbeat to settle.
Once the pair had gone and the remaining trio had finally disappeared, he let out a long, shuddering breath. He ran a hand over his damp forehead and sighed. Sneaking around in dead silence was never his forte — brawling, now that was more his style. He did, however, take quiet pride in the fact that his old swordsmanship master had once praised him for being able to muffle his breathing like a wild animal. That he had nearly been detected sent a chill through him nonetheless.
"What the hell was that guy's deal?"
Feeling oddly drained, he pushed himself upright and dusted the grit off the seat of his trousers.
The sky had turned a deep crimson, and the night butterflies were beginning to stir their wings. A beautiful courtesan would not look kindly on a client showing up with a clammy, haggard face. Li Bai slapped both cheeks with his palms — a sharp crack — to shake off the tension. He needed to change his mood; a magnificent full-bloom rose was waiting for him.
Work was work, and play was play. Knowing how to draw that line was everything.